Things I Feel Ambivalent About: Jazz

When people ask me,"Do you like jazz?" I never know what to say, exactly. It's a tough question.

For maybe the first half of the 20th century, jazz was crazy stuff. I'm talking about times when conventional popular music involved white guys with slicked back hair and pinched voices crooning through megaphones about someone named "Marybelle." Then jazz came out of left field. Jazz was music played in whorehouses by drug addicts.  It had actual rhythms in it. Sometimes jazz musicians played notes that were not in the sheet music. Sometimes there was no sheet music! Dangerous, dangerous stuff.  

Even when it hit the mainstream it was still pretty great. Duke Ellington, Count Basie -- all good. Miles Davis and John Coltrane -- a lot of awesome stuff by those two. And then in the 1950s rock came along and, well, jazz didn't react well, I feel. You ended up with Charlie Parker, who is supposed to be a genius. He never did much for me personally, and didn't for most people. Except, of course, for the People Who Know Best, who trip over each other to get in line to kiss his ass.

Basically, jazz got arty at that point, and that's usually where you lose most people. "Arty," by my definition, is when only the people that "get" it are the people who spend way too much time immersed in the art form in question. These people value novelty over accessibility. These are the fanboys, critics, participants -- they eat and drink the art form, so they naturally get jaded with the same old stuff and start looking for something new. The arty stuff has the originality they need. And it makes sense to them because perhaps they do have greater levels of understanding for the art form, through intense study.

But does that make the arty stuff "better" than something more understandable by the layman but perhaps less original and complex? Typically the answer would be yes, because the fanboys, critics and participants say so. They feel it and feel it deep. The rest of us don't feel it, though. So how is better? I don't think it is, really. It's like saying "Star Trek" is the world's greatest cultural achievement because the Trekkies love it so much. 

This phenomenon reminds me of a a great pro wrestling documentary called "Beyond the Mat." Stay with me here. One of the wrestlers featured in the movie was Jake the Snake, and boy he was a sad case. He was long past his salad days in the '80s, and was reduced to going to tiny backwoods underground wrestling arenas. I bet he was the inspiration for the recent movie "The Wrestler."

The saddest part of Jake the Snake, though, was his sex life. In his heyday, he'd have sex several times a day, literally. As he got older, though, he somehow lost the ability to have normal sex, and had to resort to weirder and weirder forms of sexual stimulation. He had built up some sort of tolerance for regular sex and had to get more and more exotic just to get the same feeling.  It's basically the same thing that happens to a drug addict who builds up a tolerance and then needs higher and higher doses to get the same high.

That's how I think of the "fanboy, critic and participant" type. They're addicted to their art form. Eventually the simple stuff can't quite do it for them and they need increasingly complex and strange forms of the same thing to get the highs they need. Then they justify it by assuming they have some sort of "elevated" understanding, and that only stupid philistines would ever enjoy pop music when they could listen to Charlie Parker's endless, pointless noodling. 

Maybe that's a little unfair. There is some degree to which everyone gets more sophisticated taste in things as they get older and wiser. But I do there is some point at which a person has gone too far down that road, and they end up becoming critics in local free weeklies and trashing anything popular while heaping praise on anything weird and incomprehensible. 

And maybe Charlie Parker really is as good as people say. And maybe if I spent half my time studying music, my tastes would be honed to the point where Charlie Parker would seem like a God on Earth. But frankly, there are so many hours in the day. I can't spend all my time learning to appreciate jazz. I'm busy learning about history, politics, language, film, literature -- there's a lot out there and not really that much lifetime to process it all. I don't want to put all my eggs in the jazz basket. 

Meanwhile, there's lots of great art that actually is understandable to the layman. I "get" Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album as much as the fanboy does (at least I think so), and I didn't have to work hard to do so. Shakespeare is like this too, I think -- it takes a little bit of work to understand the language, granted, but his stuff is mostly just about sex and death and lame jokes. Everyone gets that stuff. 

Every genre of every art form has a few people like this. You don't have to be an art major to enjoy Monet and Picasso. You might, however, have to be an art major to really enjoy Jackson Pollock. Pollock might go too far, in my view. I suppose for every artist I suppose it's debatable which side of the line he or she falls on.

But my objection is to how it becomes "fact" that Monet, Picasso and Pollock are all enshrined as similarly Great Important Artists, just because the art addicts say so. I think that you're less great if you're less accessible to the layman. It's all well and good say deep things, but you ought to say them in a language that most people can understand, or you're really only talking to a few people. And there's a certain elitism in that. 

What was I originally talking about? Oh yeah, jazz. So I feel that jazz was once great, but nowadays is pretty much of two crappy, disparate types -- the inaccessible and the overly accessible. The inaccessible is Great Important Art that we're supposed to enjoy but don't, which I've already explored ad nauseam. The overly accessible is the stuff all the cool people know to dislike, because it really is boring: Kenny G, David Sanborn, etc.

In the latter category you get the encapsulation of jazz in the modern day, to my mind: a coffeeshop with some old, pudgy, conservatively dressed white guys tootling away. You picture that they're all married, work as dentists or something, and every Saturday night they live out their childhood dreams of being musicians. Their music stinks, sure, but they're kinda cute. And they're having fun, so let 'em.

But this new category begs the question: Why isn't it great art? It's accessible, right? More people bought Kenny G records than have or will ever buy John Coltrane albums. Doesn't that make him a great artist, by your definition, smart guy?

That is a tough one. I do get the feeling that Kenny G fans don't really feel his music deep in their souls. I think they put it on as background music at cocktail parties and forget it's there. I think that art has to arouse some level of deep passion among people to really be considered great. 

So maybe I'm not a total democrat when it comes to artistic tastes. The masses don't get to decide on their own what's great, because then each boy band who sells a zillion records one year and then collapses the next would get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I think the stuff we consider truly great should appeal to both the cognoscenti and the masses.  Charlie Parker doesn't get to be great, and neither does Kenny G. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album does, and Louie Armstrong does. A few others. It's a small club.

So anyway, I guess the answer to the original question is pretty simple. I like some jazz, but not a lot of it. Come to think of it, that's true of just about everything. Eighty percent of everything is crap. It's the other 20% that makes life worth living.